


See Orion and Say Nothing

by SBG



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Other, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-10-14
Packaged: 2017-11-16 07:36:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/537066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SBG/pseuds/SBG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, there was a man who lived on an island. (A chronicle of sorts of Danny Williams' life on Hawai'i.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	See Orion and Say Nothing

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Sorry for the summary. This one's hard to summarize and beyond that, I'm plain _sorry_. I swear to you I am actually a happy person!  
>  2) Thank you to [LdyAnne](http://archiveofourown.org/users/LdyAnne/pseuds/LdyAnne) and [annieke](http://archiveofourown.org/users/annieke/pseuds/annieke) for the heartfelt feedback and "are you sure you mean...?"s.  
> 3) Credit must go to Ani DiFranco and her _Untouchable Face_ for the fic title.

Once upon a time, there was a man who lived on an island. The island was beautiful, considered a heaven on Earth by many. The man was not there by choice, though, and did not think the island such a lauded destination, certainly not the paradise its other residents and visitors believed it was. To him, it was different and strange and represented everything in his life that he no longer had. On the island there were flowers year round, no winter snowstorms. There were traffic jams but no shouting or honking or swearing, just unreasonable miles of cars lined up and awful reggae blaring out of them. There was a strange, exclusive language he could not understand the way he could participate in the regional idioms back home. There were too many rainbows and not enough clouds.

However, on the island there also lived his daughter, his one and only reason to remain there and accept his new life and unwanted surroundings. He did try to accept it, though he suspected no one could tell. Due to situations in his life, he had become like a porcupine, quills ready to defend at a moment’s notice. He was all sharp points to protect a soft underbelly and the organs that lay beneath it. His heart. His heart was what couldn’t take more pain, and while deep down he didn’t want to prickle and irritate, he also didn’t want to bleed out everywhere the way he knew he easily could. For his daughter, though, he would do anything, live anywhere, so he focused on performing his job to the best of his ability and not worrying that everyone who encountered him knew that a porcupine had no place amid the dolphins and their carefree natures.

Of course, it wasn’t all so bad. He had moments of stability in a life set adrift by events over which he had little control. His scant visitations were lifesavers, the hours and days with his girl the only time his quills didn’t feel like they could rise up at the slightest provocation. He was partnered up with likely the one person on the job who cared to see beyond the jagged and defensive edges, taken in by his family to almost, almost make him feel at ease with his new world. But those things were few, and they were far between and never felt wholly permanent. He made it work. He was miserable and wretched and did not enjoy his life, but it was what it was and he got by this way for months, determined to do it for years out of necessity if not desire.

And he would have. Danny Williams would have taken the jibes and derision of those who could only consider him as outsider; he loved his daughter and he was good at the job despite what anyone said. He had been prepared to do that, prepared to be the best cop on the island to stick it to everyone who called him names when they thought he could not hear, and everyone who didn’t care if he heard. 

What he hadn’t been prepared for was Steve McGarrett to come at him like a force of nature, pull him from the life he didn’t enjoy into one he enjoyed even less, but needed so much more. In a matter of a few heady, adrenaline-pumping days, Danny had found something that maybe, just maybe, felt solid beneath his feet and made the island less lonely. His intuition told him that the governor’s task force was something different, better. It didn’t take effort to feel comfortable. When he was with the team, he did not feel too much like he was out of step from the rest of the world. He didn’t question the immediacy of this feeling, allowed himself to embrace it while knowing that it was dangerous to do so.

In those fast-paced first days, also, there was an underlying spark of attraction buried not too terribly far beneath the aggravation Danny felt for Steve. After the rush of the case and with the depth of Steve’s pain (and his own), it was inevitable, really, that he and Steve wound up fucking hard, frenzied and rough when the last of the paperwork had been filed. That first time was brutal, both of them sore from bullet wounds and anger, but so intense that it gave him feeling of power and life he could not resist. It was also unavoidable that they continued having sex, off and very often on as adrenaline dictated. In that unspoken arrangement, there was a certain amount of consistency, as close to permanence as Danny could allow himself. His heart wasn’t open, but his body was. That was what he convinced himself of, at any rate.

His life developed a rhythm and it was good for a while, until it wasn’t. Steve screwed his Navy Intelligence go-to Catherine Rollins when she was available and Danny was okay with that. His thing with Steve was not about anything except gratification and stress relief and, really, that could be gained in so many places. Danny had no say in where Steve got what he needed. 

But then Danny screwed his ex-wife and allowed old feelings to resurface. She screwed his head just like always, though he didn’t believe it was on purpose, and the good thing he had with Five-0 even seemed tainted by the clusterfuck in which he had willingly taken part. The life that had been as close to happy as he’d ever had became stained with the blood of the heart he knew better than to let go unprotected like that, even for a second. Even for the idea that the family he’d once had could be his again. His life was no fairy tale and he’d do well to remember so after that.

He didn’t. 

That indiscretion and colossal error in judgment with Rachel cost him dearly. Realistically, Danny knew he was not the center of the universe and the things that happened, unbelievable though they were, would have happened regardless of his actions. Knowing this, he still was unable to separate his badly stitched and still unhealed heart from what was going on with his friends. To him they were all related, as if the imaginary quills he raised in defense due to Rachel and Matty and everything, everything, had stuck deeply into his team. They protected no one and made them bleed just as he did. 

The bleeding for all of them continued to the point he could but wonder if it would ever cease. So many things happened in the months, the year, after that and his head was spinning with it all of the time. He couldn’t make it stop, find that solid ground he’d been foolish enough to think would last, if nothing else in his life would. The island shrunk around him. All he had, again, was Grace and she had to be enough. The team was fine, but they were not together anymore, their lives too full to share and Steve’s wounds in particular too deep. Still, while they went right, Danny veered left, always left, and somewhere in the back of his mind he hoped that eventually he’d swing around and somehow be right again. He met a nice woman, had a good time with her. But she was to the left as well, and dizzyingly so.

Through it all, the good and the bad and the budding relationship with Gabby that he took slowly for varied reasons not the least of which he had to keep to himself, Danny and Steve had their clandestine, primal fucks. The intensity never waned. These closeted, dark corner joinings of theirs were the only things aside from his sweet daughter that remained constant while everything else fleeted, and so it was natural for him to cling to those moments and assign more meaning to them than existed. He knew even as he did it that it was stupid. He couldn’t seem to prevent it, and it got worse every time they were together.

Danny took the pleasure Steve gave him, gave pleasure in return and said nothing about feelings; Steve couldn’t want feelings, couldn’t handle them with what was happening in his own world, or at least couldn’t with Danny. Danny was a shrewd man. He knew these things, though sometimes, sometimes Steve looked at him in such a way he thought he could be wrong. He wasn’t and couldn’t be wrong. He had to remember that for his own safety, but it was difficult. Once his heart was involved, it couldn’t be shut off so simply. He kept seeing Gabby. He liked her company, but being with her was nothing like what he’d come to depend on with Steve. Any attempt he made to separate Steve in his head and heart was unsuccessful.

For far too long, he talked a lot and said little. He played his part to great excess at times. He told no one how he felt. He had no one to tell. 

Then Steve stopped fucking him too, suddenly and without comment, and it made him hollow. Steve left them all to complete his own mission and when he returned, Danny expected a wild night of hard sex and didn’t get it. Danny didn’t blame Steve so much as was gutsick with worry for him, and for the them-as-a-couple that had never existed in the first place. Except he did blame Steve, and more so himself. He started to curse ever meeting Steve, allowing himself to believe his life could go the way he wanted it to for once. Steve removed himself, just like that, and if the only thing that had lasted for more than a year suddenly vanished, then what else might? 

He felt like he’d jinxed himself when the unthinkable happened one day, when news came that his daughter could be taken from him. He realized, then, how truly she was the only thing keeping him from falling apart. He would fight. He had to fight, had to not care if his quills took out Rachel, who he used to love but could now muster only resentment. And, like before when his world quaked and split, those around him suffered worse. Everyone acquired new wounds, and they were deep.

But Steve, who bled from twenty-year-old wounds as much as fresh ones, suddenly had his own person to prevent them from being mortal, someone permanent and someone who was not Danny. It was fine. Danny saw that Steve and Catherine were an excellent match, built for each other in all the right ways. He saw it every day, whether he wanted to or not (not, always not) and those feelings of his, misplaced and wrong and never meant to be anyway had to be forgotten. He had to forget them, not think about how easy it had been for Steve to dismiss him off to Las Vegas, or how easily he had stopped needing Danny when before he had convinced himself that maybe, maybe. He knew he could make Steve happy and that it didn’t matter. Steve already was as happy as a man like him could be, and it had nothing to do with Danny.

Danny couldn’t do anything but forget, now. He knew what he wanted was something he could never have, but he couldn’t stop fighting for his girl. He would give up Steve. Never Grace and, secretly, never the thought of leaving this place and these people who might one day give him what he needed again if he only held on long enough.

It wasn’t so easy, giving up Steve. His body missed the sex, but his heart, his foolish heart missed _Steve_. The worst was knowing Steve never knew or could know what they had meant to him and the way Steve still looked at him sometimes. Danny wasn’t mistaken about those looks. He wasn’t, but he did what he had to. He protected himself as best he could, encouraged Steve with Catherine and told himself everything would be okay. One way or another, it would always be fine. These were the words he told himself, every time he looked at the figurative wreckage around him. Every time he looked at Steve with someone else, someone he liked and admired and who was perfect. 

So it was, and here, now, he sat under the stars in Steve’s backyard. The party was over, if it could have ever been called a party. Chin was drunk and stonefaced and held upright by Max, which would have been humorous if it wasn’t so fucking heartbreaking. Kono had gone off to hook up with her quasi-corrupt boyfriend. Steve and Catherine were cozy on the same chair, always touching. Danny was apart, stared at the sky. He spotted Orion’s belt, bright and shining, and would have pointed it out once just for the hell of it as if there were no one there who hadn’t been able to find it themselves since they were eight years old. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Catherine lean in to kiss Steve. He was too drunk to roll up into a ball and extend his quills, but not too drunk to feel the pain as it cut him. He said nothing, tilted his head higher. Danny gazed at Orion and felt small amid the vastness of space.

Once upon a time, there was a man who was an island.


End file.
